Special pleading

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The agency paradox: every agent believes in an equivalent double standard: viz., the key to its principal’s business transformation is to disintermediate everything but itself. An instance of, “I agree with you generally, but my particular case is special”.

Examples abound. The JC, because he is lazy is an inveterate simplifier. There is not a contract in the world, he is fond of saying, that could not be half the length it is. This is hardly a controversy: you will find any practising lawyer to whom you make this observation in violent agreement. So too, the law society, regulatory bodies and legislators. The SEC has written impassioned tracts imploring practitioners to be brief. The European Commission won't let you even market securities unless you are curt to the point of bluntness. It is widely acknowledged, that most legal discourse is overwrought; much of it hot air.

Yet we find a curious dissonance: for however passionately a legal eagle may agree about this in the abstract, it will be a different story in the particular, especially where the particular in question is her own document. This we call a paradox. You know how the JC loves a paradox.

Now everything in the legal eagle’s armoury is arranged around the analogy. This is stare decisis: the doctrine of precedent. The common lawyer proceeds exclusively by anecdote. She treats each case on its merit.